I doubt the russians improved it. Storey is (from former Soviets) that they bought the entire production line in Italy and moved it directly to Russia. Then proceeded to build it for 30 years. See improvement of consumer items WAS POINTLESS to the communists. Because to them a "car is a car". They were more interested in putting effort into thrir military and international influence. There's no incentive to worry about mere consumer stuff. Only capitalism worries about improving consumer items.
@@OffGridInvestor Not really. They improved it to be cheap and somewhat reliable in the cold. As I read in an old book written by one of the chief engineers at the time, they had to correct about 800-900 small things in the design before they started mass producing them. And it was still very very bad. But hey, at least they make reliable snow beaters
Leiam Whittaker noone said fix but improve. There was nothing wrong with swords and spears and catapults or sails and propeller. Its just that machine guns and rockets and artillery and nuclear subs and jet fighters are lightyears ahead.
Yeah, because of their drivers. Lada drivers now in modern Russia are a bit like the US stereotype of little old ladies driving huge old Caddilacs they can barely see over the wheel of, except the Russian ones are drunken old soaks, with few brain cells left. There are plenty of other/modern cheap cars there now.
I worked at a lada dealers back in the 80s . Strangest thing was that I never saw two beige ones exactly the same colour - no pun intended , but literally saw 50 shades of beige . Ladas were superior to the polish FSO as they didn't stink of the fish glue they used to stick the headlining in . I'm being serious .
"50 shades of beige" >excited Lindybeige noises< And ah yes fish glue. The VW Beetle was known for that too... probably the least flattering new car smell there is XD.
I owned and drove both, and never smelt that. But I'm guessing that was a new-car-smell issue, and I've never owned a new car in my life until last year, so I avoided that...
I can't stand that new-car-smell, it's just toxic chemicals to my nose, and quite unpleasant. I left all my windows down every night when my one-and-only new car was garaged overnight - anything to get all the plastic offgassing out of the car. On the basis that only cheaper cars might smell that way, then if anyone ever wants to bring a brand new Roller around to my house for me to smell in comparison, I stand ready.
I used to have one of those. I know all the jokes. But on the plus side, they were reliable ( so little in them that there's not much to go wrong as long as you have a spark and some fuel ), they cold-started better than most other cars of the era ( 42 amp alternator ), the heater was incredible, they didn't dent from minor dings ( 18 gauge steel instead of 23 for some cars, smaller is thicker ), and you could park it in even the scummiest of council estates and know that it'd still be there, and not up on bricks, when you came outside again. They were also very cheap to ensure. On the downside, crappy mpg, dreadful dead-feel steering ( worm and peg instead of rack and pinion ), poor acceleration, rust-prone, and the windows often dropped down into the door panels and required chocking in place with wooden wedges. Good first cars though....
+Ste Cork The engine was so simple you could run them on anything that was combustible. There was stories of people that ran them on kerosene when stuck on a camping trip when they had nothing else. Not that it was efficient or cheap, but it worked for the situation.
I still drive a Lada on daily basis. It was cheap to buy, it's easy to work on it, parts are cheap as if they were for Daewoo Tico, no electronics. I don't need anything else. Kalashnikov among the cars.
I remember in the old country(this was some time during the late 1990's) my uncle was giving me a ride to the train station. Every time he hit a small pothole there was a knocking noise coming from the engine bay. I asked what was the knocking noise. He said it was the engine knocking because it wasn't bolted down and he didn't have the money to buy the bolts or they were hard to come by. Anyway, the friggin' lada will run with the engine swirling around like a pancake in the engine bay.
Well, i have the honour of owning an 89' Lada Samara as a first car, and she's one hell of a beast. Certainly reliable, cheap, simple, not as good as modern or western cars, but they're alot of fun
Funny is, that this is an export version, and the export versions were a little better than the cars that were sold in the Soviet countries::D And a person could not just come to a car dealership and buy a car, he had to stand in queie for years:D
@@matiasfpm I can't recommend it. Аи-92 tastes like shit, personal experience (I had to syphon the last couple of litres out of a big tank once with a simple garden hose. Fun times!).
So are 1960s tractors in my area, for much the same reasons. Extremely simple with no comfort. Heavy as hell with hopeless MPG because of the weight. And the simple engine.
"Austins and Metros" #EpicGrammarFail That; and the Metro's original engine was legendary for its durability, if not its refinement. A crappy VW gearbox didn't help. (yup; VW sold Austin a lousy model of gearbox... probably on purpose)
@@jimtaylor294 You're getting mixed up with the Maestro. The Metro was just rebooted Mini with a hatchback. The Maestro had the VW box, later cars had Honda stuff though. Hell the late Maestros were incredibly tough, well built and dependable. The scrappage scheme killed most of them off though, IIRC over 2000 got scrapped during the length of the scheme.
I used to know a plumber called Dave Savage from Barnsley that had a Lada. I remember him saying he was getting rid of it for a new car... & you guessed it, that car was another Lada! 😂😂 🚽🚗
Grew up with a 2101. These cars were amazing if you took care of them: so easy to fix, that and 8 year old could do it and could take a hell of a lot more beating than modern cars. My dad even welded extra supports back when he was a wee lad and I remember getting into an accident where a bloke ran straight into the back of our car- we got by with a broken light and a bent bumper, while the other chap got his entire front bent in. Sadly, as my dad got older he got annoyed of the constantly rusting car body and bough and Audi, which had zinc coating and a hell of a lot more problems that constantly keep popping up.
Ladas seem to be very resilient. That's not much rust for an old car. When i went to Chernobyl last year there were several old Lada shells knocking around. All still pretty solid
The climate in the UK is quite unforgivable to rust-prone cars. But yeah on the Chernobil topic name one western car that will run in conditions of nuclear fallout - after the UK gets what they have been asking for centuries.
They were great cars, loads of the guys on farms around where we lived in the seventies had Moskvitche's (Remember them?) and Lada's. I had a 4x4 in the nineties and a Urinal sidecar outfit with. three wheel drive. What you have to remember is that in Britain agru=icultural wages were shit and these cars or a pushbike were the options
Honestly, these cars (like most Soviet civilian goods) are nowhere near as bad as most people made them out to be. Able to survive the harshest environments with little to no regular maintenance with low prices and looking decent all the while. Nothing wrong with that formula.
And the export versions had (afaik) some upgrade components, like tires, and then again the cheap European cars didn't feel like the pinnacle of quality either. I cannot honestly that, say, Opel Corsa A felt any better than a Lada.
The car industry is one of the largest profit markets in the Western world - so no surprise Western car companies tried every cheap and dirty trick (including the car shows they own) to spread their propaganda - if the large capital pays for it, nothing wrong with that. Westeners shouldn't be allowed to comment on cheap automobiles as they deliberately killed that segment in their countries, and most automobiles from the Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia or today from China has zero competition at its price range. But they never tell you this on the car shows, or the service costs aswell.
I wouldn't be surprised if bullet resistance was a secret requirement, with factory workers having a shell of one out the back of the factory, some AK-47's, and a vodka break to take.
I had on for 3 years.. minus 18 centigrade and it just needs a little choke and she starts first turn. The heater was fantastic..and the bumper totald as ford Sierra cosworth off when it went into the back of me.. I just cleaned my bumper with an oily rag .. If you needed to work on the engine you just climed into the engine bay.. then there was the performance.. OK.. not brilliant until I purchased the performance tuning kit from lada..stop laughing..500 pounds fited.. So k&n air filter...twin webber conversion..racing cams and a modified ignition system. And that gave 0 to 60 on 9.4 seconds.. And that in 1992 if you were quick could anoy xr3..xr3i bmw 318 ... or even embarrassed them. With a little more work we got it down to 8.9 seconds and 140 mph. Even more fun is when the police pull you over for speeding.. Do we know how fast we were going Yes officer..and you will laughed out of court when you read what ever you write down on that ticket in court.. On your way
that is not true. Datsun based their models (on-DO and mi-DO) on existing Lada models (Granta and Kalina) So.... technically Dutsun is a Japanese Lada.
Not quite right about the intended octane rating. 76 was available in the Soviet Union, but really only petrol-powered trucks and buses ran on it. Also old UAZ 4x4s ran on it. But Lada was always designed to run on 92. Fun fact - 87 octane was sold in the Soviet Union and can still be found at servos in Russia these days, though it is rare.
No! Crash safety was a combination of crumple zones, cushioning and strong passenger compartments in addition to speed. At high speeds, it won't matter at all because the change in momentum will be fatal no matter how much cushioning was offered. In the early days of motoring, there are already cars that stayed intact in accidents, but passengers almost always died of blunt force trauma. If she rode in one of these, it would just be more of a closed casket affair even at lower speeds
@@charlesc.9012 wow, thanks for this technical response. My comment was meant to be mocking Mercedes safety. I saw many Mercedes crashes in the 80s and 90s and these cars fell into many small pieces whereas the old Russian cars stayed in a fewer pieces. I mean they seemed more solid, made of thicker steel of something.
@@adamuppsala1931 Yeah, a Mercedes also has a high kerb weight which wears out the rear suspension pretty quickly, and the engine mounts are also biodegradable. They need careful servicing, but those made before the end of the 90s are very good. A lada actually has 0 star crash safety, and made of heavy, low quality steel. When cars rarely weighed 900kg, it weighed over 1000kg. This meant it had awful handling and achieved 23mpg, a Range Rover fuel consumption figure. They also rotted like Alfasuds due to the awful steel once water touched their metal. The number of them you see is solely due to long production runs and many made, in addition to the lack of competition in communist countries, which made them more cared for than the typical runabout. It was an ok car, but someone who has seen the world would genuinely turn their nose up. Including the Brazilians. The early models are 1:1 cosmetic copies of the FIAT 124 designed by Pininfarina, which is why the early ones look so good, that is not unique to the lada Edited for grammar and spelling
idk if it is nostalgia about those things, but many people seem to remember this as a good, cheap car. My parents had one of these and they kept it basically until i got my driving license all the way in 2005. So you can say it was the first car i learned to drive in, until i got my own first car. The only plus of it was the simplicity. It wasn't dependable at all (as people seem to recall it) - it was just easy to fix. You could disassemble the whole engine in under 3 hours with just the toolkit from the boot which for Clarkson's approval i guess included a hammer. They would pop a problem quite often, but one you could fix yourself, even w/o being a mechanic at the side of the road in 1h. And everything else about the experience was just the worst. Steering, stopping, GUESSING where each gear is. A 1987 Opel Kadett felt like a Rolls Royce next to it. And when from this pile of garbage i jumped on my first car - a G60 VW Corrado it was like i got in a jet plane or Concorde. Even in the 60s and 70s when they were conceived they were really really bad. I've driven old Mercedes and Audis from that era and they are light years ahead.
Sold in Canada too. they where rust buckets. One paint option was rust spots. the metal was so thin that in an accident it wouldn't dent no sir , it would tear. the radio if you were bold enough to get the option would eat up your tapes and catch fire. Hit a bump on uneven roads and the steering came off. the front headlights made of glass would fill up with water and short out. waking up in the morning also meant you had a nice red glow coming off the cigarette lighter and the safest thing about that is the cigarette lighter nob had melted on the carpet and burnt it nicely witch also drained the battery. Duke's of Hazard style doors since they welded shut with the rust or just came off after hitting a pothole. Getting electrocuted by the door handle was awesome cause who doesn't like random electrical shorts. No alarm system needed because the horn would randomly come on in the winter time from that horn rubber on the steering shrinking in the cold. having a tow truck tow you meant you probably were only pulling a front or back axle if you didn't keep an eye on the tow trucks rear view mirror after doing a hundred meters. Would also flood with gas and wouldn't start and when it finally did the piston would explode out the bottom of the oil pan. To much problems to list on here its just nuts.
Well, they are hubcaps. You can see the steelies especially in 00:19. And alloy wheels would be too expensive for Egypt. They'd have to sell their pyramids to have OEM alloy wheels fitted on a Lada.
This is actually such a funny bit. I swear I’d watched every episode of Top Gear but I’ve literally never watched that bit before. Then getting stuck in the car was so funny.
My family had the exact model for like 23 years, then we sold it for the HUF equivalent of 500 bucks, and bought a Suzuki Ignis Have to say, the Lada was much simpler and easier to operate and had less blind area. Much better than a Trabant
"much simpler and easier to operate" that the actual fuck. You have three pedals and a wheel, thats about it. Shifter yes. so wtf u talking about. If anything I'd say this thing has a much heavier clutch than a suzuki.
Mario D. Zmaj both trucks and sports cars have those as well, I don't think you would act the same when you drive the truck as you drive the coupe. He probably doesn't speak english as his main language, he might have been used the wrong word for that; he may wanted to say "steering"
idk, my dad had a 1990 Samara, it was pretty heavy, and it had duck tape on the steering wheel because the material started peeling off. and the radio was terrible it kept making weired noises. Those communist cars are pretty much a bunch of pieces of shit. Zastava 45 also has heavy steering, but 101 is ok afaik (I was too young to remember my dad's 101) In contrast, when he got Audi 100 god damn...what a difference.
